I’ve got to admit: I’ve been a fan of things post-apocalyptic since I played Fallout 2, a geek-ish staple of mine each year. Ok, I’m not that much of a fan: I don’t chant mantras to the dead Black Isle Studios, I don’t foam at the mouth over Madmax and I’m pretty dismissive about future-present realities.
But fast forward to September this year and take a look at the situtation in New Orleans. I can almost hear undergrad political science students musing “war of all against all” like some profound take on such a william golding-esque situation (or not; we shouldn’t deny them the right to make such spurious comparisons).
“It’s human nature,” another hackneyed cliche, a complete waste of time? Maybe not. Blogs in the US have been rife with news about the failures of the federal government to get things moving, to get this, to get that, to supply this, to supply that; I get lost in the details and become all the more confused.
The speculation and investigations on-going by armchair netizens, however, is just bizarre. It’s no different from dissecting the latest bit of AP-esque news coming out of parliament or news: there is hysteria; there are deep, impressive frowns; there are quick observations (and the ones who generate these opinions treat them as deep, digging into the core of the matter, etc.) and there are narrowed eyes seeing conspiracy everywhere. I’m just as guilty of all of the above, so what’s the point of all this current rationalizing?
Not much, I suppose, except to point out to myself, more than to others, that the things we do to keep our minds busy sometimes revolve around the tragic, the absurd and the sensationalist. Isn’t that sad?
Back to Fallout and our post-apocalyptic future. I just love the setting: a world razed to the ground by a nuclear holocaust, confirming American ’50s-era propaganda, cool machines and weapons like those in crazy ’50s-era black and white alien movies, and with Fallout 2, a complete role reversal in a re-cast pre-Holocaust doomsday scenario.
The underlying character of the game is what interested me most: gritty, dirty, cheap lives and grotesque normalities: two-headed cows, mutant beasts made up of body parts, cute-ish alien invaders. And because the game has an obvious relation to ’50s-era propaganda, it becomes hyper-real: an odd, curious mix of the real and the preposterous.
It makes me wanna go out and buy Brazil, it does!
